eBook: $40

EDUC 58108 • 3 credits • Alaska Pacific University • Graded A-F

Instructors: Jim & Diana Kurka

School improvement cannot happen in a toxic culture, one where teachers are in conflict and a negative attitude prevails.

In this course, Dr. Anthony Muhammad sheds new light on the diverse issues of resistant staff, with an emphasis on developing a cohesive, positive culture. Teachers and administrators alike will recognize their colleagues as Dr. Muhammad describes them:

• The Believers – who believe that all students can learn, and that what they do in the classroom can and will make a difference
• The Tweeners – the idealistic new teachers just learning the ropes
• The Survivors – staff members who suffer from burnout, and whose primary mission is to make it through the school year
• The Fundamentalists – who are heavily invested in the status quo and a force to be reckoned with

Throughout the course, educators explore the root causes of staff resistance to change, and leave with immediate, accessible strategies that improve school culture. Dr. Muhammad provides the framework for understanding dynamic relationships within a school culture and ensuring a positive environment that supports the changes necessary to improve learning for all students.

Click here for more info and registration »

eBook: $40

EDUC 58107 • 3 credits • Alaska Pacific University • Graded A-F

Instructors: Jim & Diana Kurka

Students who don’t get the education they need run higher risks not only of dropping out of school, but of incarceration, homelessness, and early death. Pyramid response to intervention (PRTI) seeks to remedy that situation—and has met with remarkable success—by systematically identifying students’ needs, providing targeted interventions, monitoring students’ progress, modifying interventions as necessary, and thereby enabling all of a school’s or district’s students to learn at high levels. In this course, expert presenters Austin Buffum, Mike Mattos, and Chris Weber share their experience implementing PRTI. They take participants through the critical stages of establishing professional learning communities (PLCs) within schools and districts, using universal screening tools to ascertain students’ learning needs, and devising interventions for students at three tiers. In Tier 1, the classroom teacher differentiates instruction to meet all of his or her students’ needs; in Tier 2, teachers begin targeting their interventions to meet the needs of those students not met in Tier 1 (e.g., through small group work and systematic push-in and pull-out strategies); and in Tier 3, teachers call on the expertise of others and practice one-on-one interventions for the remaining few. The presenters emphasize the role of collaborative teamwork and instruct participants on how to make their meetings purposeful and effective. Interviews and classroom footage illustrate how constructive PLCs and PRTI has been for all parties invested in the mission of helping all students achieve at the highest levels possible.

Click here for more info and registration »

eBook: $40

EDUC 58106 • 3 credits • Alaska Pacific University • Graded A-F

Instructors: Jim & Diana Kurka

If students are not engaged, there is little if any chance for meaningful achievement. But student engagement is not chance, especially for students disinclined to be engaged; it requires a teacher’s careful planning and execution of specific strategies. In this course, educators will learn to create classroom environments in which engagement is the norm. Interviews with teachers and students, classroom footage, workshop activities, lecture, and the accompanying eBook bring to life this critical subject for the educator who aspires to engage all of his or her students in all of their learning. Implicitly—and sometimes explicitly—students ask themselves four questions that determine how engaged they are in the classroom:

• How do I feel?
• Am I interested?
• Is this important?
• Can I do this?

Educators will learn to facilitate such emotions for students as enthusiasm, interest, enjoyment, satisfaction, and pride, so that those students can answer, “how do I feel?” in the affirmative. They will learn to raise their students’ energy levels, demonstrate a positive demeanor, express their own enthusiasm, and use humor to create a classroom culture in which all students are accepted and challenged. To promote their students’ authentic interest, educators will learn to use games, inconsequential competitions, friendly controversy, unusual information, and effective questioning strategies. To help their students embrace what they’re learning as important, educators will study how to engage their students in setting goals, one of the primary motivators for academic achievement. They’ll learn to incorporate cognitively demanding, real-world tasks into instruction that clarify the relevance of what students are learning. Educators will also be prepared to help their students develop strong feelings of self-efficacy, not through superfluous praise, but through making students aware of their potential futures which they can affect through their own efforts.

Click here for more info and registration »

eBook: $40

EDUC 58105 • 3 credits • Alaska Pacific University • Graded A-F

Instructors: Jim & Diana Kurka

For educators to design instruction that advances all their students’ achievement, they must be able to design assessments that fully illuminate what their students are learning. To grade their students fairly and productively, educators also need to know how to track student progress through detailed descriptors of the essential skills and knowledge their students must learn. Most educators struggle with these issues, however; grades can be inconsistent from teacher to teacher, department to department, or student to student and teachers cannot always adequately communicate to parents how their children’s grades are determined. Marzano Research Lab’s expert presenters cofounder and CEO Dr. Robert J. Marzano and Vice President Dr. Tammy Heflebower walk course participants through the research and theories that support what kind of feedback, assessment, and grading students need to help them learn; how to construct those assessments; how to create rubric-based scales to inform both formative and summative assessments; and how to monitor and affect their students’ progress. Interviews with teachers and students, classroom footage, workshop activities, presentation, and the accompanying text bring to life this critical subject for educators who aspire to provide the kind of responses and guidance to their students that keep them highly engaged in their learning and making steady progress toward meaningful and purposeful achievement.

Click here for more info and registration »

eBook: $40

EDUC 58104 • 3 credits • Alaska Pacific University • Graded A-F

Instructors: Jim & Diana Kurka

Proactive reading instruction—in everything from phonics to comprehension—is required both to prevent problems with and to promote authentic literacy. This course offers elementary educators a research?based menu of reading intervention strategies that prepare educators to intervene immediately and effectively at the first signs of students’ struggles. The course equips educators with routines and activities that will make confident, able readers of all their students.

Click here for more info and registration »

eBook: $40

EDUC 58103 • 3 credits • Alaska Pacific University • Graded A-F

Instructors: Jim & Diana Kurka

In this practical course, Dr. Kay Burke shows how to create and use assessment tools that improve instruction (formative assessments) as well as gauge its success (summative assessments), and how to arrive at an effective balance of the two.

Dr. Burke demonstrates how to plan instruction as part of a collaborative team, repacking the Common Core standards and sharing meaningful instructional objectives with students. She provides examples of performance tasks that will motivate students in every grade.

Teachers taking this course will get a first-hand look at checklists, rubrics, and informal assessments in use in actual classrooms — from second-graders studying shapes to high-school juniors investigating global human rights abuses. Educators will come away with tools and strategies that they can use immediately, making balanced assessment an integral part of their own instruction.

Click here for more info and registration »

PDF – GAINS Presentation – Phoenix AZ 4:17:12

PPT – GAINS Presentation – Phoenix AZ 4_17_12

Fall 2012

More information coming soon.

October 10, November 15, 2012 & January 17 and February 13, 2013

More information coming soon.

November 7, 14, 28 and December 5, 2012

More information coming soon.